On the 11th anniversary of the terrorist attacks, the official state-owned Iranian media corporation, Press TV, offered us a rather bizarre piece of anecdotal evidence that the correlation goes the other way around.
Press TV is systematically offering climate alarmist stories; see those 170+ examples. Today, it also printed a rather incredible piece by Kevin Barrett, an American Arabist-Islamologist, titled:
11 years on, more people believe 9/11 was “inside job”The article claims that almost everyone in 2012, including 3/4 of the Muslims and, even more shockingly, 89% of the Germans, believes that truthers are right. The German figure is particularly shocking - or, given its obvious falsehood, amusing – but is follows from a "scientific poll", we learn.
So explosives and not airplanes were behind the collapse of the World Trade Center as well as the Pentagon, we're told. In fact, if an airplane were able to cause the damage observed at the Pentagon, it would have to silently walk along a complicated curve resembling a PacMan trying to find a way out of the maze: the author describes many details of this hypothetical path.
I can't understand these people. It's just so insane. The very idea that an aircraft – such as a Boeing 767, the model sent to each of the two towers in NYC – isn't possibly capable of demolishing a building seems like a sign of complete inexperience. Everyone who has ever tried to build a high enough tower from cubes or other building blocks for children must know that it's not easy to make sure that it's stable and that it becomes unstable when perturbed.
Now, take this big aircraft, fill it with lots of fuel that burns and that is enough to move this aircraft by thousands of miles, speed it up to hundreds of meters per second, and send it to the middle of an unnaturally thin tower. Now, how stupid and prejudiced does someone have to be to be "certain" that nothing wrong can happen to the building?
Moreover, how obsessed with ad hoc and unnaturally contrived theories do you have to be to believe that this collision with an aircraft isn't enough so that explosives had to be added to the "plan"? Even if you are a truther, why don't you simply believe that the attack proceeded just like in the official story except that the planners and hijackers were U.S. agents? This would be so much simpler and more physically acceptable. It would still be insane because it requires a degree of coverup that is impossible to achieve in an intelligence service of a democratic country.
However, if your alternative theory requires both a focused aircraft as well as explosives prepared to destroy the building as well as the coverup for both parts of this plan, it's clearly even much less plausible.
Or take the Pentagon. How much biased towards implausible explanations do you have to be to think that the hole above wouldn't be caused by a collision of an aircraft? Could you please draw a picture how an affected building of this sort should look like without explosives, only with an aircraft? It would look exactly as above.
Or take the timing of the falling floors of the World Trade Center. How hard it is to find out that with a nearly elastic model, the time of the fall may be as short as sqrt(2) times the time of the free fall, in agreement with observations? And physics offers explanations for a possibly even faster fall – the pressure from the hot air in between the floors (and burning fuel) may bring the lower floors into motion before the elastic collision. And so on and so on.
I think that I don't have to convince most readers. Most of such crazy beliefs are wonderfully covered by Penn & Teller's Bullshit; conspiracy theories (including JFK- and 9/11-related ones) are no exception:
I surely recommend you all 89 episodes (per 30 minutes) of this wonderful show. Up to at most 4 exceptions, I have watched all of them. You may mostly find them on YouTube.
They make fun out of the crazy people. However, they also offer you lots of very valuable explanations (from both sides, if you wish, but with a clear explanation what they believe) and lots of data and analyses. For example, they also kindly say that some ordinary people tend to believe conspiracy theories because they find it hard to imagine that some powerful people or objects – e.g. JFK or the Twin Towers – could be liquidated by an incomparably "smaller", mundane counter-force, such as a crazy random assassin or a group of stupid Islamic bigots. They just find it incommunserable. However, there's no law of physics that would say that everyone can only be killed by his true peer. Presidents, skyscrapers, and all of us are vulnerable to some "lowly threats", too.
Note that Penn and Teller are kind of climate hysteria skeptics, too – well, they're mixed in some cases. Several episodes were directed against environmentalist cults and one of them was specifically against carbon indulgences (they also succeeded in forcing the green activists to sign the famous petition against water). The episodes funnily criticize both things that are believed and practised by "highly decoupled lowly and apparently crazy mavericks" as well as "institutions painting themselves to be as official as you can get"; the show is highly balanced in this respect. They're fellows of the CATO Institute. Still, they belong among the most prominent, visible, and influential American fighters against paranormal beliefs and conspiracy theories. Have you heard of them, Mr Lewandowsky?
The article printed by Press TV is billycock and so is the opinion that most of the citizens of civilized nations are truthers and that truthers are right. Lewandowsky's claim that climate skepticism is a variation of conspiracy theorists' belief system is billycock, too.
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